baidu, international, marketing, search engines
In Other peoples posts, Website Advertising on November 3, 2008 at 11:54 pm
Search Your International Search Engines
The US search market may be dominated by Google, with Yahoo! taking a chunk as well, but this isn’t always the case in other areas of the world. Google has presence in many countries, but these countries might also have their own search brands that are just as well known or even more preferred, especially in Asian markets (like Baidu in China). Here are some tips to get started on finding those other search engines.
It may be a little tricky finding good foreign search engines, especially if you’re unfamiliar with brands or your market, or are searching in English for non-English ones. One way to find them is to search for your country and “search engine.” For example, I searched for “France search engine” and came up with several links to sites that list many French search engines. I found links to major ones like Google.fr, Yahoo! France, and Voila, and smaller ones like Kagibi and Cliweb. But I also found special regional engines like Breizhoo (for Britany) and E-Corse for Corsica. Not every search engine I found for France may be popular or up to date, and my basic search didn’t even immediately pull up big names like Orange, a telecom company with search on its homepage. It took some digging around and some creative variations on the search terms.
You can also try going to a foreign search engine you find and use the foreign term for search engine, like Suchmachine in German or motor de busquéda in Spanish. Typing Suchmachine into Yahoo! Germany, I found MetaGer, Klug Suchen, and Suchen.com (in addition to Google.de). If you know the proper term to search under, this is another good way to find your foreign search engines.
Another way of finding search engines is to look at the international traffic coming your way. If your site already has international visitors, your website analytics can tell you which search engines they used to find your site. Take a peek at your visitor stats to see where they’re coming from (and also what terms they’re using). Consider asking your customers what sites they like to use as well.
To be sure you’ve found an engine that’s worth the time and effort to rank well in, you’ll also want to dig up some market research on international search habits. To get your international SEO program going, you might find yourself putting in extra time and effort, but in the end it’s worth it!
international, keywords, marketing
In Other peoples posts, Website Advertising on November 3, 2008 at 11:54 pm
www.internationalindustrialseo.com
Your International Keywords
I was recently doing some keyword research for a client that has a site targeted towards Mexico. I double checked the database I was using to see if it tracked Spanish-language searches in Mexican search engines. It said it did, but I still found the results my keyword database was giving me were almost totally unreliable. Google Mexico was giving me good search result pages, but I still had no sure way of knowing if the Spanish terms I was looking up were really reflective of searchers’ queries and the local marketplace. The Google AdWords Keyword Tool lets you see approximate numbers of searchers in different geographic locations and languages as well, but it wasn’t any more helpful in giving me reliable numbers either.
So given this, how can I (and how can you) get good keyword research for an international site?
Start by having your terms professionally translated. Translators often specialize in areas of terminology or subjects, so you can know that the person turning your English into Spanish knows what they’re doing. Technical and business terms should be translated with care so that accuracy is maintained. They can also give you pointers about what terms locals are actually using and how people talk about subjects. They might also have some helpful information on your local market.
Speaking of local markets, do some market research. Do you know who your local competitors in Mexico and Europe are? If you do, go to their sites and take a look at their content. What terms are they using in their copy? If the site has title tags and meta descriptions, do they have any useful keywords in them? Who comes up in foreign search results? Taking a good, in depth look at your market is good business sense anyway, so apply it to your website, too.
Talk to your foreign customers! They found your products and services, so ask them how they did it. What search engines did they use? What terms did they look for? Knowing how your customers found your site, whether by product or brand name, is valuable insight into the best keywords to use. Also, if they’re using a local search engine, or a multi-national one like Google, they might be seeing slightly different results in Italy than you do in Iowa. This is because some search engines can tailor results to fit the location of the searcher.
Keyword research for non-English languages is a little more time consuming and requires some extra thought. But your end result should still be that you find the best keywords for your website that will help you gain visibility in foreign search engines. Keyword databases may be helpful for some languages like French and German, which have large, established numbers of internet users. But more often, you’ll probably find that concentrating on local sources to do your keyword research in is the most reliable bet.
